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General House Rules
1: Removing first and second excellencies from the game. See the general charm page for their replacement - Ability Excellency - (Ability) Mastery. Rationale: First and second excellencies are superfluous. They're almost equally effective so there was no reason to buy both for an ability. I decided to replace both with a success purchase charm instead of a dice purchase charm to add a bit of haste to combat. Yes, I know, people like rolling their dice but when you add 10 or more extra dice to a roll and then have to count out all of the successes it really slows things down. 2: Non-excellency charms with would normally add dice to a roll instead add automatic successes equal half the number of dice added rounded up. These successes add to any successes purchased with (ability) Mastery. Rationale: Once again, to speed up the process of combat. 3: Ability Excellency - (Ability) Mastery does not count against a solar's charm limit per round. So, a solar could use (Ability) Mastery and 1 other charm between DV refreshes. (Ability Mastery) is the only exception to this rule for solars. 4: The pertinent (Ability) Excellency - (Ability) Mastery may be invoked for defensive purposes any time between step 2 (defender response) and step 8 (following calculation of raw damage) 5: Dragon-blood defensive charms which would normally not function against perfect attacks can be made to function with the expenditure of one temporary willpower. 6: ALL PLAYERS WILL BEGIN THE GAME PLAYING HEROIC MORTALS. ALL CHARACTERS WILL BEGIN THE GAME ALREADY KNOWING EACH OTHER. ALL CHARACTERS WILL BEGIN THE GAME IN THE CITY OF THORNS. NO PLAYER MAY BEGIN THE GAME WITH AN ARTIFACT. SO DECLARITH THE ST! Rationale: Many reasons for this. I want to start everyone as heroic mortals for a variety of reasons: So you can sorta get to know your character without as many game mechanics getting in the way, to give the characters more room to grow and to provide a first-hand account of the stark differences in creation for mortals and exalts/gods. I want all the PCs to know each other in their backstories because, in my opinion, the whole "PCs getting to know one another and learning to trust one another" thing while possibly richly rewarding in RP is usually only annoying and slows the entire game down. So, this time I'm trying it this way. The PCs already know each other and it's up to the players to decide how they know each other and how they got to Thorns. I wholly endorse player collaboration on this. The banning of artifacts at the beginning of the game makes sense in a couple of ways. First, you're starting off as mortals so you're just not likely to have artifacts since most require access to essence to attune and operate. Second, it allows me to manage power creep much more easily. There's a huge difference between mortals and exalts and an equally large gap between exalts and exalts using artifact weapons/armor. Doing things this way I don't have to immediately introduce antagonists that can punch out Cthulhu just to provide a challenge. In short, it gives me more room for escalation which I like. 7: All Most ST rolls will be open. I'm not a big fan of hidden rolls and I will not be using them but they will be employed in certain situations when I want to maintain player surprise. All of my rolls will be done using the exalted dice roller http://www.miketilly.com/exalted/diceroller.html and will usually be displayed to the players. 8: Damage is no longer rolled. Post-soak damage deals health levels in damage equal to half the dice pool rounded down. Rationale: I have two reasons for doing this. The first is that, with the variability inherent in dice rolling, it's thematically unsatisfying for an awesome attack roll (one with a high number of threshold successes) do little or min damage due to a bad roll or for a bad attack roll to do a high amount of damage. The second reason is because I again hope that this will speed up the process of combat and keep things more interesting. 9: When wielding a weapon with two hands or when equipped with a shield a character may use strength instead of dexterity in calculating their attack pool and their parry DV. A character's natural soak is equal to (strength + stamina) Rationale: To make strength more important in combat and to make dexterity less of a super stat. 10: At character creation only 2E Core and Scroll of Heroes books are allowed for player use. Merits and Flaws may be chosen from those listed in Scroll of Heroes. 11: Craft Air, Wood, Water, Fire, and Earth are all being rolled into a single craft skill - Craft Elements. The following exotic craft skills are available to be purchased separately. Required abilities must all be at least equal to ranks in the exotic craft. For example, to place 3 ranks in Craft (Genesis) the play must have at least 3 ranks in Lore, Medicine and Occult. Craft (Genesis): The skill of modifying and creating biological organisms using Essence and technology. Requires: Lore, Medicine and Occult. Craft (Glamour): This skill permits Raksha to craft items out of Essence and dreams. Requires access to Raksha charms. Craft (Magitech): The ability to repair, operate and maintain all kinds of complicated First Age devices. Requires: Craft Elements, one other Craft skill and Lore. Craft (Necrosurgery): The skill permits one to prepare corpses for Necromancy and to repair and maintain existing necromantic artifacts. Requires Medicine, Occult Craft (Soulforging): The skill permits one to combine the souls of the dead with Labyrinthine ore to create Soulsteel. Requires Craft Elements, and Occult. Craft (Vitriol): The skill permits the Infernal Exalted to manipulate the Malfean catalyst known as Vitriol. This is usually to produce Infernal relics, but may also be used for melting demons into chalcanth as well as a variety of other uses. Requires Craft Elements and Occult. Craft (Fate): Used to manipulate Fate. Usually only the purview of Sidereal exalted. Craft (Quintessence): Allows one to form objects out of quintessence while in Yu-Shan. Requires Occult, Lore 12: Once characters become Exalted they will choose 10 favored abilities. They will not be limited by predefined Caste abilities. I'm reverting to RAW on this one - five caste abilities and five favored abilities. The original intention of this houserule was to remove the drawback of redundancy in Dawn Caste Abilities (it only made sense to use martial arts OR melee, thrown OR archery and maybe war, thus using at most 3/5 abilities) Recent errata, however, has shifted the metagame such that it is now beneficial for Dawn Castes to invest in all of their Caste abilties. Therefore, I'm reinstating the rule-as-written that all Solars will have their 5 Caste abilities and 5 chosen favored abilties. '' '''13** Spending a temporary willpower allows a player character to invert their wound penalty (ie a -2 wound penalty becomes a +2 bonus) for a number of actions equal to their primary (Limit) Virtue. Removing age limit on acquiring permanent Essence. Limit Breaks are only required to exert their “Partial Control” effects. Players may apply the full Limit Break effects at their discretion. Additionally, while under the effects of Limit Break all stunt die is multiplied by the character's primary (Limit) Virtue before being rolled. This bonus does not count against any dice cap. Characters may learn Charms on the fly either by spending banked XP, or by going into XP debt (spending more XP than one currently has banked; in effect, resulting in negative banked XP). Characters may not learn more than Essence/2, rounded up, Charms this way. The player may not purchase new charms or raise traits until the XP debt is paid. Characters may learn Combos on the fly by expending a virtue channel. Characters gain one bonus dice per Intimacy on any action in which they defend the intimacy. This bonus does not count against any dice cap. Rationale: Increasing the value of Willpower and Virtues and generally trying to ratchet up the power-level of the game a bit. ''14 '' No charm, spell or combination of effects may reduce the Speed of any action below 3. Duration combat, effects which would reduce the Speed of an attack below 3 instead increase the Rate of the attack by 1 for each reduction in speed below 3. '''''15 Players will receive for free all general Charms for which they meet the minimums. For example: all players will receive Ability Excellency - (Ability) Mastery for every ability in which they have at least one dot. As a reminder, the general charms are Ability Excellency - (Ability) Mastery, (Ability) Excellency - Essence Resurgent, Infinite (Ability) Mastery, (Ability) Essence Flow, Divine Transcendence of (Ability), Supreme Perfection of (Ability), Cosmic Transcendence of (Virtue) and Sun King's Divine Zeal. Rationale: General Charms are necessary but not interesting and are a huge xp sink. I'm removing that impediment for thematic reasons.